Minneapolis’s Giant Pencil

The Atlas Obscura Podcast

SiriusXM Podcasts & Atlas Obscura

Society & Culture, Places & Travel

4.6 • 1.8K Ratings

🗓️ 29 December 2025

⏱️ 13 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When a 180-year old bur oak tree collapsed during a rainstorm, a couple in Minnesota made a new life for it. Plus: How many U.S. states have you visited? Join the AO community and create your own U.S. state tracker map here: https://www.atlasobscura.com/my-state-map

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, this is Johanna. I'm the senior producer of the show. And I just want to tell you about something really quickly before we get into today's episode. Atlas Obscura has just launched a U.S. state tracker map. It's exactly what it sounds like. You can look at the map of the United
0:22.7	States, check off which states you've been to. And it might sound like a kind of simple tool,
0:30.6	but before I did it, I realized I had no idea how many states I had been to. So I did the map the other day. I went and checked off
0:40.6	all my states. Turns out I have been to 38. And as I was marking off the states one by one,
0:49.1	it brought up all of these memories that I had from these trips that I had been on, from these experiences
0:55.7	that I'd had in these states. I also did not realize that I have basically never been
1:02.8	anywhere in the Great Plains region. Got to fix that. So as we're going into the new year here
1:10.0	and thinking about any upcoming trips and travel that you have, this is a really straightforward tool to just kind of help put things in perspective.
1:20.8	Might learn something about yourself.
1:23.2	You can do this too.
1:25.1	Go and make your own map, check off your states, at atlasobscura.com
1:30.9	slash my dash state dash map. That's atlasobscura.com slash my dash state dash map. We'll put a
1:39.6	link in our episode description. Okay, here's today's episode.
1:52.3	I've seen many sculptures in my time, but I've never seen one of a pencil, let alone a pencil that is as tall as three NBA basketball players stacked on top of each other.
1:57.6	And you probably haven't either, unless you've encountered the Lodi pencil in
2:02.5	Minneapolis. The pencil was made from a 180-year-old bur oak tree that collapsed during a storm.
2:09.5	But it didn't fall down all the way, and so some homeowners came up with an inventive use for
2:15.3	its remains. I'm Morgan Johnson, and this is Atlas of Scura,
2:20.4	a celebration about the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.
2:24.9	Today we're going to Minnesota to see how a tree falling
2:27.7	has been able to bring people far and wide together every year.
2:31.7	More after this.
	...

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